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Breaking the 65 Barrier in Church Ministry pt 2
By jason | January 8, 2008
Breaking the 65 Barrier in Church Ministry pt 1
10 Ideas for Breaking the 65 Barrier
It’s not necessarily about implementing every one of these. See which ones of these fit in your given context. And don’t let your learning and growing end here.
1. Define reality.
- Where are we as a church?
- Look at past 6 months or year and look at your average attendance in a month. This will give you a more realistic picture of where you’re at.
- You need to do this with adults specifically. The 65 barrier is really about adult involvement.
- Maybe graph this out so you can see trends.
- Doing this will help you see how far you’ve come in a year from now.
2. Grow yourself.
- Lead Pastors need to grow.
- Maybe one of the reasons you can’t pass this barrier is because you’ve become the lid on the organization.
3. Make space for your church to grow.
- The number of reasonable seats in your worship space.
- Do you have enough space to grow your church beyond 65?
- 70% rule. When your seating gets to 70% of what the room will hold you are full capacity. This is peculiar to American culture.
- So to get past 65 you need at bare minimum 100 seats.
4. Casting a vision for growth.
- Do you have a clear vision for your church to grow.
- This isn’t just developing a vision statement. It’s spending time with God asking him what his vision is for the church to grow.
- Do you just share the vision of the church or also the benefits of that vision? That’s addressing the “Why” question.
- Develop a list of 100 reasons why my church should grow. (nb: this would be a good exercise.)
5. Have a couple of tough conversations.
- You may realize you have a few people standing in the way of growth.
- There may be people who are creating negativity and barriers for vision.
- Once you decide you’re going to grow you will probably lose some people.
- There are going to be times where some people need to move on to a church a that fits them.
- Don’t do this lightly.
6. Personally mentor new leadership.
- Find a handful of people, especially new people, and invest in them.
- If you are to grow you need to identify new leaders continually.
- Not necessarily a long drawn out 2 year process. Rather, drawing people together periodically to talk about where the church is heading, etc.
7. Focus on the Sunday service.
- Many are focused on way too much.
- When are you finished with your sermon prep for Sunday?
- Two ways to focus more on your Sunday service:
- Work on your preaching. (Grow as a communicator.)
- Re-evaluate your worship service. (Does it need to change? Learn from other churches.)
8. Break the 65 barrier with a special sermon series.
- Focus on a very “attractive” series.
- Why am I here? Marriage/family. Relationships.
- One of the primary goals at this point is to gather people.
- Spend time considering when to launch this special emphasis series.
9. Go full-time with church.
- To break this barrier the lead pastor needs to be full-time not bi-vocational.
- Consider adding another full-time staff if you are already full-time.
- You must always staff for next level not this one.
- You will never have enough money to staff, so you have to staff your church for growth at the next level.
- Sounds simple, it’s risky, but it will pay off at the end.
10. Think 125.
- Start thinking like a church twice your size.
- If you do this you’ll be able break these growth barriers. (nb: this is the basic idea of reverse engineering.)
- One of the best ways to do this is to get around some pastors of churches that have larger churches and then learn from their experience.
- Attend some key conferences to learn how to break these growth barriers.
Concluding thoughts:
- Set a timetable to break this barrier. Place some growth goals in front of you.
- Listen to God as he speaks to you about your church.
- Commit freshly to evangelism. Breaking growth barriers is all about reaching people far from God.
Topics: Church Planting, Leadership, LifeConnection, Missional Movements |