Ben Merold on Church Growth, Part 1: Church Growth Questions

I’m attending the Southern California Coalition of Community-Based Christian Churches at Hope International University, a conference for churches less than 300 in weekly attendance. Our church planting organization, Stadia, is co-sponsoring the conference.

Speaker Ben Merold is the lead minister at Harvester Christian Church in Saint Charles, Missouri, and was pastor at Eastside Christian Church in Fullerton, California for many years. Ben’s topic for today is evangelism that results in church growth. The theme verse was Ephesians 1:18 — which reminds us that the same power which raised Jesus from the dead is available in our churches today.

Ben presented questions to ask, challenges to overcome, and

Questions to Ask

1. Do you really want your church to grow?
   • Most everyone will answer “Yes” to this question, but the real issue is whether people are willing to make the changes needed to grow.
2. Are you willing to take some risks?
   • Every missionary has to get out of his or her comfort zone.
   • Set goals. A goal is “something you intend to do for God with His help.” A goal needs to be big enough that it can only be accomplished with God’s help.
   • You must allow leadership the freedom to fail.
3. Is you leadership leading? Or trying to control?
   • A study of church leadership meetings:
     • In declining churches, the leaders talked about “things” — a mindset of control.
     • In growing churches, the leaders talked about “people” — a mindset of service.
   • A study by Howard Hendricks found that:
     • 84% of people in churches were willing to change in order to grow.
     • 16% were unwilling to make such changes.
     • 70% of the formal leadership of the churches studied came out of the 16% who were unwilling to change!
4. Are you willing to broaden the base of your church?
   • Purdue University study:
     • Group #1: Went home and started one new class in each department. Within one year, each new class was as large as the average class, without taking anything away from the existing classes.
     • Group #2: Went home and merged classes any time lost a teacher. Within one year, the merged class was no larger than the larger of the two classes prior to the merger, resulting in a net attendance loss.
   • You have to broaden the base with new ministries, new groups, new classes, etc.
5. Will you teach stewardship?
6. Will you pray for the power of God?

The Ben Merold on Church Growth, Part 1: Church Growth Questions by Church Planting Journey, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.