An earlier post on Carl George’s church growth books: Link
This past week, I was leafing through Carl George’s book Prepare Your Church for the Future. I was particularly struck by some of the things George says in the second chapter of this book, a chapter titled “Tally What You Inherited.” George claims that every church “embodies growth strategies that can be both identified and analyzed.” Then he proceeds to list sixteen different of the most common church growth methodologies. To my mind, four of these methodologies are of particular relevance to Unitarian Universalist congregations. These four existing and common growth methodologies are Sunday school, feeder and receptor patterns, next-door-to-the-right-institution syndrome, and capture by committee involvement.
Below you’ll find my brief notes on these four popular Unitarian Universalist growth strategies. Unfortunately, as I’ll detail below, these have not been effective growth strategies for us. We have also managed to screw up so-called Small Group Ministry, a growth strategy based on Carl George’s work, and I have some thoughts on that as well. But first, four classic growth methodologies that don’t serve us very well….
Sunday school: Unitarian Universalists put their own twist on this growth methodology in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Under the influence of Sophia Fahs and Angus MacLean, many Unitarian Universalist Sunday schools tried to create truly excellent religious schooling based on the then-successful model of classroom education. Fahs edited a superb series of Sunday school curriculum written by top scholars and educators. Local congregations recruited schoolteachers and other professional adults as volunteers to staff and manage their Sunday schools. The growth strategy worked in the short term, as parents brought their children to Unitarian Universalist churches to receive excellent schooling about religion. But children were rarely taught how to do religion, and by the 1960s one study showed that 90% of the alumni of Unitarian Universalist Sunday schools did not stay in our churches as adults.
Trying to create an excellent Sunday school continues to be one of the dominant growth methodologies for Unitarian Universalist congregations. However, it is a fatally flawed growth methodology as usually implemented in our churches. All we offer is good curriculum and trained teachers. But Sunday schools are typically organized in a fashion that makes them impossible to administer. Volunteer teachers are recruited with a combination of guilt and veiled threats (“all parents must teach” — or else?…); since the teachers are in the classroom under duress they are likely to communicate to children that religion is drudgery and a chore, and not something that the children will want to pursue when they grow up.
Compare this methodology (of Sunday school as drudgery), with the Sunday school growth methodology outlined by Carl George. Laypeople are fired up with a vision of Sunday school as a way to grow the church. They are given meaningful leadership roles, with the goal that “each trained and commissioned Sunday-school teacher will increase attendance by ten people.” Classes are not allowed to get bigger than ten people, under the theory that “a volunteer class leader can best handle a group of about ten people.” By following this Sunday school methodology rather than the Fahs/MacLean methodology that we use, George says that “the Sunday school has been for two centuries a lay-led, small-group movement highly effective in producing church growth.” [pp. 28-29]
Feeder and receptor patterns: George points out that in many areas there are feeder churches and receptor churches. The feeder church could be a smaller church that doesn’t offer sufficient opportunities for some people (e.g., an inadequate music program or youth program), or it could be a church in conflict that is driving its members out the door to another church. As people in the feeder churches become disaffected for whatever reason, a nearby receptor church attracts them. Cynically, George says that “all the [receptor] church has to do it be the least-worst choice of the searching family, and it will grow in size!” [pp. 31-33]
I think we Unitarian Universalist have put their own distinctive twist on this growth methodology. A typical Unitarian Universalist church is fairly small and is only moderately well-organized, with perhaps an adequate music program, and a barely adequate youth ministry. We may not fit the mold of the typical receptor church, but for many people who find traditional theologies abhorrent yet still long to belong to a church, we are the least-worst choice.
A few of our larger churches (with average attendance of over 400 a week) are growing at a reasonable pace. I would be curious to know if those larger churches are growing simply because they are receptor churches in their area, presenting the least-worst church option. Even though it seems a little vampire-ish, sucking the blood out of other living churches, if we were more intentional about it we could perhaps turn some of our churches into really effective receptor churches.
Next-door-to-the-right-institution: You might also call theis the no-brainer growth methodology. George writes: “Many churches profit from an in-town denominational feeder system such as a college,[etc.]…. These employ or train ready-made parishioners who need little incentive to fellowship… among friends from work or school. Thus it’s not so much this church’s strengths that have recruited them as other… forces….” [p. 38]
Many reasonably successful Unitarian Universalist churches succeed simply because they are right near a college or university. We tend to attract a well-educated demographic, and colleges and universities provide concentrated pools of people in our demographic. I’ve heard tell of some of our churches which function more like an exclusive faculty club for the nearby university than like a church. Be that as it may, George points out that being next door to the right institution can be a successful growth strategy. Unfortunately, it is an inherently limited methodology.
Capture by committee involvement: Perhaps the most popular growth methodology among Unitarian Universalists, capture-by-committee is not just a growth methodology, it’s also a way to ensure that you don’t grow beyond a certain point. George writes so compellingly on this topic, pointing out the inherent classism and idiocy of capture-by-committee, that I’m going to quote him at length:
“Some denominations, like the Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Episcopalians, have become captive to the upper middle class. How does a church keep these often materialistic, high-power people interested and involved? One solution is to offer them a seat on the church board, or after that’s filled, to place them on a significant committee, giving them veto-making authority in order to meet their power needs. In some smaller churches, up to half the adult membership is involved in one of these groups.
“Sadly, once it has filled the available slots, this system only guarantees that little or nothing can be approved. It resembles a passenger train’s brake cord that any passenger can pull at any time from any car, forcing the entire train to a screeching halt. There is only one accelerator, and it’s located at the front of the train. But access to it was lost when the church founders passed away. So in most cases a multitude of boards and committees serve mainly to prevent new vision from taking the church beyond the status quo.” [p. 37]
Every Unitarian Universalist church I have either belonged to or worked for claimed that the best way to retain newcomers was to put them on a committee. Every Unitarian Universalist church I have belonged to or served contained more than one committee whose primary goal seemed to be to veto any forward momentum, preferring the status quo (no matter how creaky) to any new vision. This is a growth methodology that contains the seeds of its own destruction. Thus it is sad to see how wide-spread this growth strategy is among us.
The obvious conclusion: Carl George believes that it’s time for churches to go beyond the old growth methodologies. He is an advocate of nurturing small groups within the congregation to serve as the primary engine of growth. Thus some Unitarian Universalists who have read Carl George have come to the obvious conclusion that they need to form Small Group Ministry programs in their congregations to serve as a new engine for growth.
The not-so-obvious conclusion: Most of our congregations — including the majority of congregations trying the Small Group Ministry approach — are not growing, or are declining. The denomination as a whole is growing very slightly, but most of that growth can be attributed to a small fraction of larger congregations that are actually growing at a reasonable pace. Most of our congregations are not growing, and Small Group Ministry programs don’t seem to promote growth — at least, not as currently implemented.
I suspect that the main reason for our lack of growth is that we rely too heavily on capture-by-committee-involvement, thus creating churches full of people with veto power. Small Group Ministry programs have fallen prey to veto power — even though Small Group Ministries are designed to attract newcomers, all too often the participants in Small Group Ministries use their veto power and turn their Small Group Ministry into a Closed Group That Excludes Newcomers.
Unitarian Universalists aren’t the only ones to screw up small groups as a growth methodology — Carl George acknowledges that other churches have found their own ways to screw up small groups, too. In a subsequent post, I’ll explore Carl George’s strategy for preventing screw-ups, and discuss why I think his strategy will work extremely well in our churches.
In the mean time, what do you think about all this? Is your Sunday school growing (by at least 5% increase in attendance over a two-year span), and if so, why? Are you next door to the right institution, and that’s working well for you? Have you figured out how to become an effective receptor church? Or is your UU church filled with people who sit on committees and have (or want!) veto power? By the way, I’d love to be proved wrong on any of my gloom-and-doom pronouncements — so if your church has experienced significant growth after implementing Small Group Ministry (say, at least 5% annual increase in worship attendance per year, for at least a two year period), tell us how you did it!
And what of the Evangelizing Preacher? Isn’t that what Augustus Conant did here in Northern Illinois? Got on his horse and planted Churches in Geneva, Elgin, and Rockford?
That’s how the Mega Church got started here in the 90s. I Reformed minister starts a congregation meeting in the Schools and twenty years later there’s a congregation of ten thousand.
I’m in one of those larger churches which is growing, and we don’t “use” any of those strategies. There is only one reason to have a religious education program and that’s to give children a religious education. That’s way to precious a program to “use” it for growth. As a grad of a Sophia Fahs Sunday School who did say, let me also remark that Sunday School met my needs extremely well and left me desiring involvement in adult church…it was adult church which was rather dry and disappointing.
Same with Small group Ministries. The point of those is to be a vehicle of relationship and transformation for the people who are in them. If you take that seriously, you will let those groups form and learn to trust each other and not upend them by requiring them to take in new members. Instead, you will form new groups through the years and include new members that way. Small Groups are precious in themselves and shouldn’t be seen as a vehicle of church growth.
I think your church grows because 1) you are doing a good job of being a church, really nurturing relationship, transformation, and spirituality in individual lives. and 2) you are paying attention to guests and newcomers and offering them a chance to partake of that growth themselves. You have to be doing #1 before there’s much point in doing #2.
Nurturing relationship, transformation, and spirituality is very scary stuff, and all the scarier when you have to more or less make it up as you go along and present it in what can be a hostile environment. In my opinion, that’s what we don’t do well enough to be a vital, growing religious movement.
P.S. I am told that healthy growth is taking place across the board of church size. Most large churches are not growing, and some small and medium churches are growing like gangbusters.
Our church has grown ~10% for each of the last 3 years, from about 220 adult members to 280. We’re a suburban church in the SW district. Covenant groups are part of our growth strategy. We’ve had CG for ~7 years. We currently have a dozen CGs. Of those, seven are doing well – meeting regularly, normally with 5 or more attendees, involving 10 or more adults over a 3-month span. I was part of the leadership team that set up CGs at the beginning. We drew heavily on Carl George’s works.
Control issues are the hardest parts of adapting George’s methods to UU churches. In his model, ministers lead the Covenant Groups. They allocate, delegate and coach that authority, but the minister is the authority. The minister’s charisma helps keep the groups on track, following the model – which means having the leaders show up at the CG leaders’ meetings, having covenants, being intentional about involving new people, doing service projects. Many UU ministers are not comfortable with that model, and many UUs are antagonistic to it. Thus, of our five weak CGs, (and our several CGs which have folded) most aren’t following the model.
Over the years, we’ve had about a half-dozen folks join our church just so they could lead a CG. Several of these were people who’d attended without joining for a while, and wanted to start a new group, because there was no extant group that spoke to their deepdest interests.
Interesting! A few thoughts on three of the models you discuss:
I doubt that the UUA’s membership drop-off in the later 1960s can be attributed to the kids of the Fahs/MacLean method leaving for lack of religious continuity. Other factors seem more likely (and are more often pointed to), including political polarization around the Vietnam War and the black empowerment controversy, the end of the baby boom and a drop-off in Sunday School enrollment, the congregational flight to the suburbs, and truly dysfunctional adult behaviors involving drugs and sexual experimentation.
I’d also question whether the current Sunday School models are really based on Fahs and MacLean; the classroom model is older than their approach, and contemporary curriculum design doesn’t reflect their approach anyway. It is true, though, that *new* congregations from the 1940s into the 1960s were often organized around religious education programs. That could be done today, too, although the birthrate in the liberal middle class is much lower now than in the 1950s.
I suspect the feeder-receptor model is only pertinent in a few metro areas, largely in the Northeast. The fastest growing district in the UUA is the Mountain Desert District, where people may be drawn to the UU churches because there are too few liberal churches generally, but I haven’t seen any data that would suggest that UU church growth is taking place at the expense of smaller UU churches. New England, on the other hand, may be a different story. (At any rate, even if the UUA were simply a receptor for disgruntled liberals from other churches, we’d still be in a position to grow.)
The next-door-to-the-right-institution model strikes me as having been the Unitarian model for 150 years at least. The fellowship movement can be seen as an adjunct to the expanding higher-education and technology sector in the GI Bill-era. Even the Samuel Eliot church-planting boom in the 1890s was a way of providing Yankee religion to Ivy League-educated lawyers, bureaucrats, and government employees in the growing West. Unitarians have usually drawn in people whose theological liberalism has been formed by other social forces.
Business folks sometimes think about their sales processes as a funnel. It’s wide at the top (lots of sales leads/opportunities come in) and it narrows as it goes along…fewer and fewer of the leads that go in the top of the funnel make it to each subsequent step in the process. Only a few drop out the skinny end of the funnel as closed deals. Sometimes I think about church growth the same way. For every 100 visitors to our church, maybe 50 will return the next week, 35 the week after that, and 25 might sign up for a program. Ultimately, maybe only 10 or fewer will become members. The fundamental lesson of the funnel analogy is that we need a lot of leads (or visitors) to add just a few sales (or members).
I recognize some of the issues you’re citing here in my own church, but I also think a fundamental problem for us is that we aren’t getting enough people (visitors, church shoppers, etc) into the top of the funnel. Add to that all the other things you’ve mentioned, and you end up with not many new members (and in our case, a church that’s shrinking, as people who die/move/become disenchanted aren’t replaced.) In our church, I think the reason for this is simple: we haven’t tried very had to invite new people. But we’re working on it.
FWIW, I don’t think your veto-power idea describes our church. If anything, I think we’ve got too few people willing to step up and lead.
I have to agree that the current model of religious education in our congregations is probably not the kind of growth engine some folks imagine it to be. Right now on one Program Consultant e-mail list people are looking for “proof” that hiring a professional DRE leads to growth–so far the evidence has been all anecdotal. And even if there is some evidence for it, the growth rate would probably not be much more than the usual 1%.
Our church is growing like crazy. Of our 380 members, only 150 were here five years ago. We’ve got 100 new names on our mailing list and 40 new names on our young adult mailing list–just from this summer.
I’m not sure what models of growth our pastor and the Board talk about. Here are my uneducated thoughts:
I know that we’re located in an up-and-coming neighborhood full of church shoppers–mostly people in their 20’s and 30’s, with or without kids. The LFD program definitely draws the ones with kids. It also draws the adults who take and teach its classes. I know it used to be very intellectual and high-level, and now we’ve got offerings for everyone from brand-new beginners to longtime members. I’m teaching an Intro to Spiritual Practices class starting tomorrow night.
We also have a really effective Hospitality ministry of greeters, ushers and coffee-hour servers. We have a young adult ministry that functions as a gateway to deeper involvement and helps young adults get to know people. We’ve just started a Wednesday night community meal and class schedule to get people connected. And yes, when you join, we do expect you to give of your time, treasures and talents–so join a committee or a small group. We require some investment, which I think keeps people committed.
Our covenant groups are on hiatus while we re-energize them, so that’s not what’s drawing people right now. We do have a few specialized ministries, like the parents’ group, the YA ministry, the knitters, and the quilters. The YA ministry draws new members– I don’t think the others really do right now.
And the people in our committees don’t have veto power over change. Our change is spearheaded by the committees. If anyone has veto power, it’s the Board and the pastor. Mostly, though, if something’s not a good idea, it doesn’t get up enough oomph to happen and just fades away.
We are a receptor church, I think, for the gay population in our neighborhood. That’s almost like the next-door model; we’re next door to forty thousand gay people.
We are a reasonably theistic church, in that you will hear the word God every couple of weeks. At Christmas and Easter there’s some Jesus. Most of our members seem to be fine with that.
We have had a lot of change in the past five years. We’ve lost some members. I think that’s unavoidable–you can’t please all of the people all of the time. But we are pleasing 200-plus people every Sunday morning, and I think that’s pretty great.
Other factors seem more likely (and are more often pointed to), including political polarization around the Vietnam War and the black empowerment controversy, the end of the baby boom and a drop-off in Sunday School enrollment, the congregational flight to the suburbs, and truly dysfunctional adult behaviors involving drugs and sexual experimentation.
When our Congregation started a framing the discussion forum, and people lamented to collapse of liberalism, I tried to point out how truely screwed up were the 1960s and 70s and how liberal faith leaders (at least the faith I saw practiced at Oak Park’s First Cong. Church, accross the street at Unity Temple, and down a few blocks at Chicago’s Third Unitarian) could not comprehend what was happening around them.
The adults were truely baffled, or tragically off-the-deep end with it all in a few instances I recall.
No one seemed to remember those times. We’ve never really recovered.
Bill — Don’t forget Quillen Shinn, one of my heros, a Universalist circuit rider! But I’m afraid that since Shinn’s time, we really haven’t used the Evangelical Preacher model for growth.
Christine — You write that your growing church doesn’t really “use” any of those strategies. I guess I kind of expected that — there is no cookbook approach to growth. Thanks for all the info you passed along.
David — Thanks for the great info re: covenant groups (another name for Small Group Ministries), and how they ahve translated to Unitarian Universalist settings. Much food for thought in your comment, and I’m still pondering your words.
Philocrites — Feeder-receptor patterns do not limit themselves to a single denomination, and I have observed a fair amount of movement between UU churches, UCC churches, some liberal Quaker meetings, other liberal churches, and liberal Jewish synagogues. Your remarks about Fahs and MacLean are well taken — the classroom model was in place earlier among us — but Fahs in particular was very influential in spreading the model even further, and basically making it the default setting in UU churches. Her brilliance basically wiped out the other major competing approach from the 1930’s, the Junior Church model.
Chris — As a former salesman, I agree completely with your sales approach. Of course, I’m facing a different problem from your church — in our church, we had 80 visitors last year, in a church with average attendance of maybe 40, yet we didn’t grow at all.
Ellis — Your comment about serving as a receptor church for the gay population in your neighborhood is an interesting thought. I bet that’s true of other UU churches. Thanks for all your observations — and I was particularly struck by your comments about the hospitality ministry, and effective outreach to young adults.
Bill (again) — Oh, but some of us do remember those times (e.g., you, me, Lindsay Bates, etc.), and yes, they were incredibly destructive times to many UU churches. I think there’s a lot of truth in your comment that we’ve never really recovered.
But did Shinn do any good, really? I think he’s probably Universalism’s most over-rated if colorful figure.
Scott — In “The Larger Hope,” a standard history of Universalism, Russell Miller writes: “There is no completely accurate way of measuring Shinn’s permanent accomplishments, even in quantitative terms, but there is no question that he recruited hundreds of individuals, was responsible for building churches by the dozens (at least forty), and was responsible for almost thirty additions to the ministry. As many Universalist were insistent on emphasizing, it was the spirit that was engendered by such persons as Shinn, and not the statistical evidence, that was ultimately important.”
In terms of church growth, were Shinn’s accomplishments overrated? Miller points out that Shinn was a controversial figure even in his own day, and many of his contemporaries were highly critical of his claims to success. Yet I think Miller’s last line in the paragraph quoted above is valid. I will only add that I am personally indebted to Shinn for founding Ferry Beach, the Universalist conference center where I get my Universalist batteries recharged every year.