{"id":7715,"date":"2010-10-18T15:41:15","date_gmt":"2010-10-18T22:41:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=7715"},"modified":"2010-10-18T15:41:15","modified_gmt":"2010-10-18T22:41:15","slug":"the-importance-of-membership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/?p=7715","title":{"rendered":"The importance of membership"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>How important is the size of a congregation&#8217;s membership? Here&#8217;s Kennon Callahan&#8217;s response:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Regrettably, in many of the churches in our country there is a preoccupation with membership. A simple illustration will suffice: Two ministers meet at a conference. The one minister is in the process of moving to a new pastorate. The other minister, in an almost automatic way, asks, &#8216;How many members does your new church have?&#8217; The more important question would be, &#8216;How many people is your new church serving in mission?'&#8221; (Kennon Callahan, <em>Twelve Keys to an Effective Church<\/em>, 1st ed., Jossey-Bass, 1983, pp. 2-3.) And what does Callahan mean by &#8220;mission&#8221;? He defines it thus: &#8220;&#8230;in doing effective mission, the local congregation focuses on both individual as well as institutional hurts and hopes.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Of course it&#8217;s more complicated, and more nuanced, than these bald statements would imply. For the complex, nuanced version, you&#8217;ll have to read the first chapter of Callahan&#8217;s book yourself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How important is the size of a congregation&#8217;s membership? Here&#8217;s Kennon Callahan&#8217;s response: &#8220;Regrettably, in many of the churches in our country there is a preoccupation with membership. A simple illustration will suffice: Two ministers meet at a conference. The one minister is in the process of moving to a new pastorate. The other minister, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-church-administration","category-marketing-church"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7715"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7715\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7716,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7715\/revisions\/7716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}